I give the critics a lot of the credit for making “selfie” a contender for word of the year. When we look back on 2013, we’ll recall this not just as the year when everybody was posting pictures of themselves on social media, but as the year when nobody could stop talking about it.

It seems that anointing a Word of the Year is a competitive sport. Dictionary.com chose privacy as its Word of the Year for 2013, which is pretty much the exact opposite of selfie. Merriam-Webster chose science as its Word of the Year, apparently for some sort of scientific reason. Meanwhile, the Collins Dictionary has tapped geek as the Word of the Year, which seems a few years late, unless they just make geek the Word of the Year every year, in which case I applaud their lazy efficiency. And Germany has their own Word of the Year, #GroKo (yes, the hashtag is part of the “word”), which is short for Grosse Koalition, or Grand Coalition, the new political partnership between Germany’s two largest parties. (I guess you have to be there.) The NSA probably knew they’d choose #GroKo well before the Germans made it official, but it was nice of them to keep mum and not spoil the surprise.

Perhaps 2014 will be the year everyone turns their cameras around and takes pictures of other people — you know, just as an experiment. Maybe it will be the year of the youie, or the themie. In the meantime, all of us here at Zinzin would like to wish all of you the happiest and most joyful of holidays and a wonderful new year.

For a different — and deeper — take on the selfie culture, here’s the late great George Harrison singing and talking about his Beatles song, I Me Mine:

“Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You’ll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It’s not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up.”

~Brion Gysin, “Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success.”

Here is a link to a short film from 1966 titled The Cut-Ups by Antony Balch which is archived on the Gysin website. The screenplay was written by William S. Burroughs and the film features both Burroughs and Gysin.

Attention all language purists: Stephen Fry is “an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director, activist, and board member of Norwich City Football Club” (Wikipedia). In this video, Fry’s rant about language has been typographically animated by Matt Rogers, in the process crafting a beautiful and funny visual and verbal feast about the joy of playing with language, which is after all just a game that shouldn’t be taken so seriously.

“But do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades.” ~Stephen Fry

Take heart all ye wounded Detroit Tigers fans: sweet revenge is at hand! In the truest measure of immortal greatness, the “Motor City Kitties” have trounced “The G-Men” by being mentioned much more in books of all stripes. The stark evidence is seen in the above Google Ngram of all mentions appearing in books in the Google Books corpus (over 5.2 million books digitized by Google) from 1958, the year the New York Giants became the San Francisco Giants, until 2008, the most recent year available.

So while us stunned San Franciscans do our best to keep chins up and host a “victory” parade and celebration tomorrow, Hurricane Sandy-splashed Tigers fans can rejoice in this more powerful n-gram victory. Oh well, at least we took the World Series, with whatever small consolation that brings.

Kurt Schwitters (1887 – 1948) was a German artist who “worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.”

Schwitters fled Nazi Germany in January, 1937, first to Norway and finally to England, where he remained in exile until his death in 1948. His collage work often included found fragments of commercially printed text, and his move from Germany to England precipitated a corresponding shift to English language found text in his collages, as seen in Cottage, above. Just for the hell of it, I’ve put together a found poem using most of the legible scraps of English in Cottage in rough order of appearance from top to bottom: [Read more…] about Kurt Schwitters’ Cottage: following the text to see where it leads

Imagine a software company that makes a very sophisticated and complex software product. The marketing department at the company knows very well what their product does, but probably has scant idea how it does what it does — that knowledge is likely confined to the engineering department. The employees in the marketing department would probably never dream of telling the engineers how to program the company’s software (and imagine howls of derision if they did!), and for the most part, the engineers don’t meddle in the company’s marketing business. That, however, can change quickly when a company decides to rename itself, at which point, seemingly everybody from the CEO to the night-watchman’s second cousin will want to weigh-in, haggle, argue, condemn and second-guess the company naming process.

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, also known as bikeshedding or the bicycle-shed example, is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that organizations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson demonstrated this by contrasting the triviality of the cost of building a bike shed in contrast to an atomic reactor. The law has been applied to software development and other activities, and is known as the “the ‘colour of the bike shed’ effect.”

…Parkinson dramatizes his law of triviality with a committee’s deliberations on an “atomic reactor,” contrasting it to deliberation on a bicycle shed. As he put it, “The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.” A reactor is used because it is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it, so one assumes that those that work on it understand it. On the other hand, everyone can visualize a bicycle shed, so planning one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to add a touch and show personal contribution.

In our naming example, writing software is like building a nuclear reactor, while re-naming the company is seen as merely building a bike shed: everyone can understand it, so everyone has an opinion. Poul-Henning Kamp, in a 1999 email posted on Bikeshed.com, further elaborates on Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, and how ego can infiltrate and dominate simple matters like bike shed design:

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is *here*.

In Denmark we call it “setting your fingerprint”. It is about personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say “There! *I* did that.” It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement.

The problem, of course, is that naming a company or product is not quite so simple as designing a bike shed, even if many people not directly involved in the process assume that it is, and want to “set their fingerprints” on the process. It is therefore vitally important to keep naming committees as small as possible in order to keep focused on the very important task at hand, rather than be distracted by hours of time-consuming yak shaving.

Yak shaving? Yes, yak shaving, an idiomatic expression meaning, “The actually useless activity you do that appears important when you are consciously or unconsciously procrastinating about a larger problem.” Also known by the variant, “to forget, when up to one’s neck in alligators, that the mission is to drain the swamp.”

The etymology of yak shaving is uncertain. “The term is already used in the 1950 Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard by the main character Joe Gillis to describe people at a new year’s party he was going to attend by saying ‘A bunch of kids that didn’t give a hoop just as long as they had a yak to shave.'” Those must have been some bored kids. “More modern use of the term came up in a 1991 Ren & Stimpy cartoon citing ‘Yak Shaving Day,’ a Christmas-like Holiday where participants hang diapers instead of stockings, stuff rubber boots with cole slaw, and watch for the shaven yak to float by in his canoe.” Which is probably exactly what many engineers imagine the marketing department spends most of its time doing.

The point — and there really is one in all this yak shaving and bikeshedding, yakshedding and bike shaving — is to never lose sight of the big picture of what a powerful name can do for your brand, never allow the minutiae of yak shaving and endless bikeshedding meetings to derail your process. And to learn how to differentiate between the harmful flavor of yak shaving, noted above, and the helpful variety: “Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem: I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.”

Or, I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it paid off with a new blog post. But now I have to get back to the difficult task at hand: designing nuclear powered bike sheds.

See also Joi Ito’s and Seth Godin’s interpretations of yak shaving. The yak shaving concept seems to have endless subtle definitions, making even the act of defining it an exercise in yak shaving.

The recent New Yorker science fiction issue, their first ever, included a great essay by Anthony Burgess from 1973, The Clockwork Condition, in which the author comments on his most famous book, A Clockwork Orange, and the “very close film interpretation” by Stanley Kubrick. Most interesting is Burgess’ description of the origin of the title, as well as the various lexicographical connotations of the antihero’s name, Alex:

I first heard the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange” in a London pub before the Second World War. It is an old Cockney slang phrase, implying a queerness or madness so extreme as to subvert nature, since could any notion be more bizarre than that of a clockwork orange? The image appealed to me as something not just fantastic but obscurely real. The forced marriage of an organism to a mechanism, of a thing living, growing, sweet, juicy, to a cold dead artifact–is that solely a concept of nightmare? I discovered the relevance of this image to twentieth-century life when, in 1961, I began to write a novel about curing juvenile delinquency. I had read somewhere that it would be a good idea to liquidate the criminal impulse through aversion therapy; I was appalled. I began to work out the implications of this notion in a brief work of fiction. The title “A Clockwork Orange” was there waiting to attach itself to the book: it was the only possible name.

The hero of both the book and the film is a young thug called Alex. I gave him that name because of its international character (you could not have a British or Russian boy called Chuck or Butch), and also because of its ironic connotations. Alex is a comic reduction of Alexander the Great, slashing his way through the world and conquering it. But he is changed into the conquered–impotent, wordless. He was a law (a lex) unto himself; he becomes a creature without lex or lexicon. The hidden puns, of course, have nothing to do with the real meaning of the name Alexander, which is “defender of men.”

At the beginning of the book and the film, Alex is a human being endowed, perhaps overendowed, with three characteristics that we regard as essential attributes of man. He rejoices in articulate language and even invents a new form of it (he is far from alexical at this stage); he loves beauty, which he finds in Beethoven’s music above everything; he is aggressive.

The new form of language that Alex invents is Nadsat, which “is basically English with some borrowed words from Russian. It also contains influences from Cockney rhyming slang and the King James Bible, the German language, some words of unclear origin, and some that Burgess invented. The word nadsat itself is the suffix of Russian numerals from 11 to 19 (-надцать). The suffix is an almost exact linguistic parallel to the English ‘-teen’….” Thus, Alex invents and speaks a “teen” language, a common occurrence the world over. By propagating a new form of language, he is partaking in creative destruction of the existing dominant language in his culture (English), but that is just an analog to the real violence he perpetrates on society. If only Alex had become a linguist and author like Burgess, (or a namer?) then perhaps he wouldn’t have been so violent. Then again, we can’t retroactively “cure” literary characters any more than the society of A Clockwork Orange could.

“Translation is an art of analogy, the art of finding correspondences. An art of shadows and echoes… Baudelaire said poetry is essentially analogy. The idea of universal correspondence comes from the idea that language is a microcosmos, a double of the universe. Between the language of the universe and the universe of language, there is a bridge, a link: poetry. The poet, says Baudelaire, is the translator.”~Octavio Paz

This is the time of year when the linguistically inclined offer their opinions on which “Words Of The Year” best capture the zeitgeist of the year that has been. Some of our favorite nominators of this year’s Word include Geoff Nunberg, Ben Zimmer, and Nancy Friedman. But it’s the American Dialect Society that “officially” — though “just for fun” — anoints the Word Of The Year (WOTY), which they have been doing every year since 1990. So, for a little time travel and historical perspective, here are the WOTYs for each of the past twenty years (via Wikipedia):

2006: plutoed (demoted or devalued, as happened to the former planet Pluto)

2007: subprime (an adjective used to describe a risky or less than ideal loan, mortgage, or investment)

2008: bailout (a rescue by government of a failing corporation)

2009: tweet (a short message sent via the Twitter service)

2010: app

Some of these past WOTYs have clearly plutoed since Y2K and prior, but others, such as 9-11 and red state / blue state, are likely to be with us for a long time. And some — see subprime and bailout — we will be all to happy to forget and consign to history’s dustbucket.

My vote for the 2011 WOTY, which the ADS will pick at their annual January meeting in Portland, Oregon, agrees with those of Nunberg and many others: Occupy. You can still nominate your favorites for consideration on the ADS page, What’s Your Word of the Year?.

A Fallen Flag is a rather poetic term that refers to a railroad company that is no longer in existence due to bankruptcy or merger. Since the late 1950s the North American railroad industry has undergone an epic brand consolidation. In fact, presently only four Class I railroads still exist under their original names. The surviving brands are the Canadian National Railway, Canadian Pacific Railway, Kansas City Southern Railway, and Union Pacific Railroad. Why is this important? I am not sure, but I came across this logo of a Fallen Flag while on a recent stroll and did a little research. Yes I read cereal boxes as well.

1959: Southern Pacific moved more ton-miles of freight than any other US railroad.

1965: Southern Pacific’s bid for control of the Western Pacific is rejected by the ICC.

1967: SP opens the longest stretch of new railroad construction in a quarter century as the first trains roll over the Palmdale Cutoff through Cajon Pass.

May 1, 1971: Amtrak takes over long-distance passenger operations in the United States; the only SP revenue passenger trains thereafter were the commutes between San Francisco and San Jose.

1980: Now owning a 98.34% control of the Cotton Belt.

1984: The Southern Pacific Company merges into Santa Fe Industries parent of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, to form Santa Fe Southern Pacific Corporation.

1985: New Caltrain locomotives and rolling stock replace SP equipment on the Peninsula Commute, marking the end of Southern Pacific passenger service with SP equipment.

October 13, 1988: Rio Grande Industries, parent of the Rio Grande Railroad, takes control of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The merged company retains the name “Southern Pacific” for all railroad operations.

1989: Southern Pacific acquires 223 miles of former Alton trackage between St. Louis and Joliet from the Chicago, Missouri & Western. This marks the first time that the Southern Pacific has served the Chicago area on its own rails.

1992: Northwestern Pacific is merged into SP, ending NWP’s existence as a corporate subsidiary of SP and leaving the Cotton Belt as SP’s only remaining major railroad subsidiary. Of interesting note, the Northwestern Pacific’s south end would be sold off by UP, and turned into a “new” Northwestern Pacific.

1996: The Union Pacific Railroad finishes the acquisition that was effectively begun almost a century before with the purchase of the Southern Pacific by UP in 1901, until divestiture was ordered in 1913. Ironically, although Union Pacific was the dominant company, taking complete control of SP, its corporate structure was merged into Southern Pacific, which on paper became the “surviving company”; which then changed its name to Union Pacific.

1996: The merged company retains the name “Union Pacific” for all railroad operations.